Playwrights Horizons, the biggest theater dedicated to American plays in New York City, has independently developed a play called “The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence“. It looks at the relationship between the expert and the assistant loosely weaving together narratives from the Watsons of Alexander Graham Bell, Sherlock Holmes and the IBM Jeopardy! Challenge. It is potentially helpful to IBM as it frames the expert / assistant relationship as central to progress, and places Watson in that collaborative context (often humorously).

The cartoon is courtesy of Devon Wickens, who is an IBM Alumni. During her time at IBM, she was an Executive Producer of the IBM/TALK corporate radio series. In 2011, she founded BabyBummers cartoons, which are cartoons about what is trending now. In addition to her BabyBummers initiative, she also works as a Business Content writer at the Gaming Corporation. To learn more:

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft by Erik Petigura has revealed that there could be billions of habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy. According to Mr. Petigura’s paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one out of every five sunlike stars in the galaxy has a planet roughly the size of Earth flying in orbits around those suns – at distances that make temperatures on the planet neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist.

The Space Shuttle Columbia’s launch on April 12, 1981, with five IBM computers, marked humanity’s first reusable spacecraft and the beginning the US Space Shuttle Program. (Photo Credit: IBM 100)

So what’s next in space exploration? Some scientists speculate that a permanent residence on the Moon would be the next logical step. Others predict a human mission to Mars will be feasible by the mid-21st century. Whatever the task at hand, technology companies like IBM and others will be there to lend their technological know-how and scientific expertise to help explore the boundaries of what’s possible.

For many millions of people around the world, the most dramatic moment in the history of space flight was the first lunar landing 35 years ago. Of course, the journey to the Moon began long before Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle onto the Sea of Tranquility, and it was built on a series of accumulating achievements over many years. IBM was involved both at the beginning of that journey and throughout. And in the three decades following the July 1969 Apollo 11 mission, IBM continued to play an important role in mankind’s exploration of the high frontier and in the increasing use of space for science, communications and business.

Did you know that IBM’s involvement with the US space program began even before NASA existed? In fact, IBM developed computers for NASA’s predecessor, the US National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. IBM was involved in the Apollo program from the beginning. And in the three decades following the July 1969 Apollo 11 mission, IBM continued to play an important role in humankind’s exploration of the high frontier—helping advance science, communications and business. Learn more

(Video description): A global collaboration of 19 countries, the SKA will be the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built. The SKA will revolutionize humankind’s understanding of the cosmos by answering questions about the origin and evolution of the universe, as well as other mysteries of time and space. It will consist of thousands of receptors stretched across an area the size of a continent—the total collecting area of these receptors combined will be approximately one square kilometer. IBM is working to map and model the complex ecosystem of capabilities that will be required to build the SKA.

In addition to IBM driving innovation and creativity for 102 years, as IBM CEO Ginni Rometty recently shared, IBM computers have also long been used to help spur the creative process. Here are few of the more notable examples of how IBM computers and technology played a critical part in the creative process.

Category 1 (Movies):

Lord of The Rings Trilogy: IBM supplied digital effects facility Weta Digital, Ltd., with 150 IBM® IntelliStation® workstations, running Linux®, for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Weta created effects, from digital horses to Gollum, a character in the series. Weta and its sister company, Weta Workshop, won two Oscars for their digital effects work on the first “Lord of The Rings” trilogy. To learn more:

Despicable Me: IBM provided an iDataPlex system to Illumination Entertainment to help it meet the massive production requirements involved in creating the computer-animated 3-D feature film, “Despicable Me”, released in 2010. The animation process to produce the film generated 142 terabytes of data — an amount roughly equivalent to the traffic generated by over 118 million active MySpace users or 250,000 streams of 25 million songs. The iDataPlex solution also included a water-cooled door that allows the system to run with no air conditioning required, saving up to 40% of the power used in typical server configurations for this type of production process. To learn more:

Category 2 (Cooking): When you think of the creative things that humans do, cooking comes to mind as one creative outlet that appeals to many. After winning at chess and Jeopardy, taking on large databases of information to cook up something creative for dinner seems like a logical step. After all, while most chefs may only consider pairings of hundreds of different ingredients for the evening meal, there are probably unlimited possibilities of pairings that might taste good. So, the IBM flavorbot is looking to put together underrated highly flavorful ingredients, unusual but tasty flavor pairings, and bring them all together into whole recipes. To generate leads, the flavorbot looks at three databases of information – recipe index, hedonic psychophysics (quantification of what flavors people like at the molecular level), and chemoinformatics (connecting what foods the molecular flavor is actually in). To learn more, see the links below:

Category 3 (Books): Ever heard of “Abechamycin”? It’s not a new antibiotic….but it may be one day. At Pfizer in 1956, an IBM 702 helped create a 198-page, 42,000 word book of potential chemical names as a way of spurring and accelerating the naming process for the many new drugs the firm introduced on an annual basis. Learn more.

Clinical psychologist Dr Ramani Durvasula recently conducted a study of 1,000 coffee drinkers and assessed a number of common personality styles and psychological traits. The study found that people who drink certain types of coffee share common attributes such as introversion and extroversion; patience; perfectionism; warmth; vigilance; sensitivity; and social boldness, among others. For example, if you drink your coffee black, you might be quiet and moody, while if you drink iced coffees or frappucinos, you might be a trendsetter. To learn more, check out some of the infographics and articles below.